Fontainebleau, the Loire and the Valois (part II)

How
does the soil, which nourishes the sculptors of the cathedrals, which nourishes
Foucquet, which nourishes la Fontaine, and which nourishes the brothers Le
Nain, which imposed upon the Clouets, though they were of Flemish stock, the
precision and the sobriety of its aspects, after having expressed itself
completely in an explosion of love that united a thousand voices of the most
homogeneous crowd, the one, perhaps, that is closest to the earth of all that
have ever existed—how does it happen that this soil was prevented from
reappearing with its own savor, save rarely, during the centuries that followed
and in the work of a few isolated men? Its lack of accent, especially in this
region of the Loire, is precisely what gives it a charm which was to envelop
and hold those who are born and who live there. Nowhere do the hills follow one
another so gently as in France; nowhere are things bathed in a calmer light, as
distinct from the crudity of the South as it is from the profound brilliance of
the North; nowhere are the waters clearer or the air and the soil lighter. The
artists are born there in large numbers; few of them recall their surroundings.
Too many men are crossing France, situated at the crossroads of the modern
world, between Spain, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and England, and
bathed by the two seas which bring to her the East and the West. Never is she
entirely herself, and she is constantly renewing herself. Therein is her
weakness—and her strength. There is no hero to take her entirely into his soul,
but instead a diffused intelligence which is constantly reborn from her ashes
to teach the nations that they all participated in her formation and that she
does not cease to act upon their development. It is a people born to be happy,
peacefully to live by its own harvests and its own vintages, but condemned to
eternal martyrdom because it does not give others time to understand it and
because the others do not give it time to realize itself. That is the reason
why it was in such haste to build the cathedral. It foresaw that it would no
longer, perhaps, be able to bequeath its true image to the future.

Italy
breathed into it a flame which was new, at least, and, in its declining
strength, it had but little more resistance to otter. But the spirit of
Burgundy and of Flanders which, in the past, it had awakened, now impressed it
in turn. We see Michel Colombe leave the great nave to enter the colored shadow
of a chapel and bend over the great theatrical tomb of the Burgundian princes.
His desire was to equal its pompous luxury, but that was impossible. Something
thin and enervated, a kind of fiery tension toward the idea of the beauty of
form, announces the invasion of Italian idealism and, unhappily, of its
formulas as well. The façades of a hundred mansions, of a hundred churches, the
rood-lofts, the pulpits, the pews, the grating of the choirs, the stained-glass
windows, the carved wood, the forged iron, and the ceramics of the period all
bear the same imprint. Seduced by so much grace, France is about to surrender
herself.

For a
long time Avignon had arrested the transalpine spirit in its course, which
preferred to mount through the valley of the Rhone to mingle with Burgundy and
with Flanders and so avoid the territories that had been ruined by war.
Beginning with the first half of the fourteenth century, with the popes, Italy
had made the moral conquest of Provence, already well prepared to receive her
through the ancient Greco-Latin memories of the land and the tradition of love
that had never ceased to reign there. Giotto barely missed coming to Avignon.
In that city Petrarch had demanded the portrait of Laura from the great Simone
Martini, who had come to cover with noble frescoes the halls of the palace of
the popes. Unknown Frenchmen work there with him and after him. Within the
majestic fortress the walls disappeared under the painted forests that were
traversed by huntsmen, that were peopled with birds, and tapestried with fresh
moss in which one feels the quiver of the springs of living water. Even after
the departure of the pontifical court, the city remained the meeting place for
the civilization of the South and the civilization of the North. The proximity
of the court of Aix where good King Rene, himself an illuminator, surrounded
himself with image makers, with painters, with troubadours and minstrels, could
not do otherwise than quicken the hearth of spirited culture which a century of
peaceful activity had created there. Nicolas Froment, working there with him in
the cool shadow of the cloisters and of the heavy castles, is the van Eyck of
Avignon, because of his grave portraits which he hollowed out and which have
the explosive violence of the South, and because of his dry landscapes which,
even so, are burning with light and in which the orange trees grow; and many
Burgundian artists, who had lost their employment upon the arrival of the
Flemings, left Dijon for the valley of the Rhone. Enguerrand Charonton brought
to it, from Laon, with the science and the color which he got from the Flemish
painters, the clean workmanship and the health of the men of Champagne. Here,
then, was the vibrant crucible of Italian force in which the materiality and
the density of the painting of the North came to amalgamate itself with the
acuteness of observation and the sobriety of the French! In the silent
profundity of its browns, its reds, and its greens that turn almost to black as
they undulate against the abstract background all of gold with distant spires
and domes, in the tragic swaying of the great bodies that bend over the bare
corpse, in this corpse itself, pure and carved out like an idea, the great
"Pietà"
of Avignon is one of the summits of the harmony. Outside of Italy and of
Flanders, where everything, at that hour, was singing like an orchestra in the
great silence of France, it is now like the sound of a violoncello arising
alone above the tombs.

Whatever
the misery of France in the fifteenth century, the hearth from which that work
came could not fail to cast some gleams into the imaginations of the artists
from its provinces of the North. Even before the Gothic period, moreover, Italy
had reacted upon them and the Romanesque was only an application of the
essential principle of Roman architecture mingling with Eastern and Northern
influences. The image makers, the master builders, and the glass makers of
France were traveling about. There was an exchange of manuscripts, of
furniture, of armor, and of wrought iron and copper. But these were surface
Influences and the powerful life of the people assimilated them without knowing
it. It needed the great military expedition of the end of the fifteenth century
entirely to burst the dike formed by Avignon. Charles VIII brought back Italy
in the train of his armies.